This is How You Break Up
By Dave Peters
"I hate to tell you this," my brother said, "but your baby is boring."
My son laughed. It was something a four year-old could easily agree with.
Emily was only a week old. There had been a brief scare, and we'd just gotten her home. The living room was ringed with wilted flowers and rotting candy. Combine those with the smell of a dirty diaper, and you've got a bioweapon. My brother stuck a cigar in my mouth and mentioned something about Fidel Castro's face exploding. I wanted to light it up, but adding one more odor would've activated the others. Besides, Madeline had warned me. Anything she couldn't do, I couldn't do. She took off her sweater.
"I'm going to feed the baby, now."
She started to unbutton her blouse. Bobby got spooked and went to his room. Eric took a cigar cutter out of his pocket and clacked it in my face as if he were going to circumcise my nose. Then he hitched his head and I followed him outside.
"I can't smoke that thing," I said on the stoop. "I promised."
"It's all right. I just want to keep an eye on my baby."
He had a racing green sportscar named after the emergency number. It was worth more than anyone on the block.
"I guess it's no big deal," Eric said. "They might be able to get in, but none of them would know how to drive it."
Eric took the cigar out of my hands and clipped off the end. When I told him I still wouldn't smoke it, he slipped the other one in my shirt pocket and lit the first one for himself. Then he pulled out a roll of bills and put them next to the cigar.
"I can't take this."
"Sure you can," he said.
I didn't give the money back. Across the street was a man changing his oil on his front lawn.
"You have to get out of here."
"She finishes school, then I start. It'll be a while."
"Too long."
I didn't say anything. Eric sat on the stoop, holding the cigar out like a wand.
"Can't take the money," he said. "Can't go for a ride." It sounded like it could've been a question, but I didn't respond. "No. Didn't suppose so." He twirled the cigar around his knuckles in some elaborate, practiced trick. The ashes spilled at our feet. "How about Sunday?" He hadn't moved his eyes from his car. My upstairs neighbor Kristi came out of her door waving her arms as if she were landing a plane.
"Sorry," I said.
Kristi gave Eric a dirty look. He flicked an ash at her as she walked down the sidewalk.
"That'll be a story for a week," he said.
I had to agree, but not out loud. Eric sat puffing away.
"Sunday, then." He put out the cigar. "Let's go see what kind of pornography's going on inside."
Mad looked at us from over the baby. She had an expression that made me think at least one of us was extraneous.
#
"Green ketchup," Madeline said, shaking her head. The shopping bags slumped on the counter like they'd been anaesthetized. I'd fished out a box of Bisquick and filled a platter with misshapen flapjacks that looked a little like Hawaiian islands. The kids immediately began arguing over who would get the best one.
Madeline had her textbook mixed in with the breakfast dishes and the groceries. I quickly convinced Emily that her six Molokais were better than her brothers' bloated tourist traps. They ate greedily while I tried to put the rest of the groceries away.
My son finished his pancakes and tossed his dirty plate in the sink with a clatter that made Mad jump. Then he began rummaging through the last few shopping bags. He found some cereal and stuffed his hand inside the box if he were molesting it.
"Bobby," Madeline said, "what did we talk about last Saturday?"
He pulled out a fistful of red corn puffs, sprinkling some on the ground.
"I don't know." He squeezed the cereal, pulverizing it and spreading sugar dust on the floor.
Madeline shook her head again.
"Yes you do."
She squirted the ketchup across Bobby's shirt. He squealed in surprise.
#
We'd pitched a tent for Emily in our living room. She swung her flashlight back and forth, sending beams through the nylon and across the ceiling. All the while she sang to her dolls, which were sleeping in socks or knapsacks inside the tent with her. Usually the songs were about table manners or obedience, but that day they were about buttons and zippers.
On the table were the thousand plastic pieces of a space shuttle, a gift from Eric, who delighted the children with screaming dolls and wailing cars, gifts of noise and light and distance. Eric didn't have children. Bobby was wearing an inflatable spaceman helmet while he watched me put his model together. He made whooshing sounds when I plucked the parts from their silver matrix. They never quite fit together; I was always filing the edges of a cockpit window or a misshapen rocket booster. Bobby hardly paid attention until the models started to take shape. He busied himself coloring his fingernails with model paint.
Madeline came around the corner wearing a blue sleep mask. She held one finger to her lips and crept up behind Bobby. When she touched his neck with her cold fingers, he screamed. Emily screamed in response. Mad let go and put her hands to her temples.
"The migrained should watch what they wish for," I told her.
Mad nodded and pulled off her mask, revealing shallow impressions along her cheekbones. Her face looked like an unmade bed. I held up the finished fuselage.
"Interested?"
"Look at you," she said to Bobby.
She took a paper towel and began cleaning the spilled paint off his sleeves. She worked at it for a couple of minutes while Emily entertained us with a song about her shoelaces.
"I'm going to be late tomorrow," Madeline said, not looking up. "I'll be at the library."
"I'll pick them up," I told her, breaking an instrument column from the whitened plastic around it. "Stay in school."
"Stay in school," Emily said from her tent.
"Stay in school," Bobby said.
"Right," Madeline agreed. "There."
When Bobby pulled his hands away, he found out his mother had glued his sleeves together.
#
The flames were five feet high. I'd put on enough lighter fluid to sacrifice a goat. The coals wouldn't be ready for at least an hour. I killed time by swinging Emily around me, carousel-style, until she screamed loud enough to shatter the fiestaware. My neighbor stuck her head out the window and gave us a threatening look, as if she were making a very important soufflé. For Kristi, everything is always on the verge of total collapse and ruin.
Madeline was trying to teach Bobby how to make an elaborate paper airplane. Eric had brought him a book that must have been designed by someone at NASA; the plans were impossibly intricate and required an inordinate amount of precise cuts, and even glue in some cases. There were a dozen crumpled balls of paper on the ground, like a trail of breadcrumbs. I tumbled to the ground with Emily, where she found her best cake-flattening shriek.
"Go help your mother. I'm going to get the food."
"I want to come."
Everywhere was exotic. Emily had a tendency to weep at being left behind. She threw tantrums if she couldn't go to the hardware store with me. I pushed her along, not allowing for any arguments. Madeline looked up over the top of the airplane book.
Around the corner I pulled the pack from underneath a rock and slipped it out of the plastic bag. I selected a promising cigarette and walked toward the front of the building.
I'd smoked ten cigarettes in the previous two months. A little caution, a little charcoal, a little distance from Mad, and I hadn't been caught. The barbecue always explains the matches.
#
The look in Madeline's eyes had said to me, "This is how you break up."
We'd been talking about marriage, in its concrete form. That moved us to the topic of love, in the abstract, what it entails and what it requires. Although we had agreed, essentially, on the strength and importance of the bond, we disagreed on the details, the duration and the responsibility of it. I had the feeling that love wasn't quite as rare as she imagined. I thought that love could split apart, disintegrate, or be left behind. We both thought it was the most important thing in the world, but she had the idea that love was more important than everything else, put together, and I just couldn't agree. For her, no sacrifice was too great.
So I stopped smoking, but not the argument.
In her eyes was the kind of love she wanted me to believe in, the love that overcame disagreement and obstacle, but in her mouth was the idea that I was right all along, that my opinion meant the end of us. Her eyes told me that the weight I'd given her love wasn't enough, that the tether was breaking. I wanted to lie, to recant, because I felt that sometimes love makes those concessions, tells those lies. Wasn't that just the opposite of what she wanted? If I lied and told her she was right, wouldn't she be wrong, even if she didn't know it? We were going to drown in our respect for each others' wishes, even as we were holding on to principles.
"How do I know?" I asked her. "How am I supposed to know?"
This is how you break up, not the obstacles of real life but the obstacles of ideas. What's the difference?
"You're not supposed to know," she said.
"Well, I'm good at that."
She laughed. I turned the laugh into another one, and we were so exhausted that the conversation puddled out in front of us. Later that night I saw it flash through her eyes, but it didn't stay, and she didn't mention it. Then Bobby was born and the whole question transformed. It was still about love but it wasn't the same. I could hardly explain to her that we were both right.
#
Emily is face down on the blue sheets of her bed, arms spread out as if she were dreaming of flight. The raised bars keep her from catapulting herself onto the floor. On the other side of the room, Bobby pretends to be asleep, watching me through one eye. The light from the hallway cuts straight through him. I close the door until he's completely in shadow.
In the living room are the pieces of a plastic castle, strewn around the floor as if my children are Huns. Mad is on the couch, studying for her licensing test and watching a movie that's either an example or a satire of product placement. She turns her eyes to me and gives me the weak smile she reserves for people she considers mature enough not to be insecure. I sit down beside her.
"I need you to tuck me in."
"I was going to ask you the same thing. I have two more chapters to go."
The television gets louder with the commercial. I lean over to turn down the volume. Mad settles farther back into the couch, like getting into a bath. I slip in between her knees and give her bellybutton a kiss. She giggles and pushes my head away. When I move down to kiss a thigh, she gives my head a warning squeeze.
"This is why I didn't pass last time."
"Because of the kids?"
"No, because of how we made them. Between the making of them and the taking care of them, the book never came off the shelf."
"I like the making of them," I say, burrowing between her legs. "I just think I'm going crazy. If I don't get some adult conversation, you'll come home to a bloodbath." I pull her waistband down.
"Danny."
"You won't feel a thing, promise. Some adult companionship or I'll be forced to kill us all."
She takes my head in her hands and turns it toward Bobby, who's watching from his doorway. When I hold out my hand, he runs to join us. He sits in his mother's lap and nuzzles her.
"I'll be funnier when you're older," I tell him.
He doesn't answer. He runs the tip of his finger around the scar on Mad's stomach. I pick him up to return him to bed.
"Your mother needs to study. Third time's the charm."
"Third time's the charm," he mumbles.
#
My brother was silhouetted against the flames as if he were burning an image into the sky. Smoke billowed from the top of his head, and a little trickle came from the cigar in his fingertips. He looked like he was made of fire.
Madeline came through the gate, walked through the yard, and tossed her textbook on the coals.
"Didn't go well?" Eric asked.
She squirted some lighter fluid on the book, and the flames went higher.
"It's a fucking realtor's exam," she said to herself, throwing her test results on top of the book.
Bobby and Emily surrounded her, grabbing one leg each. She started to shrug them off, but thought better of it and slumped down on the grass to join them. They sensed her mood and lay down next to her without moving. It seemed like I was supposed to bury them or put them on the grill.
"That drive," my brother whispered to me.
I nodded and mentioned it to Madeline. She blinked her eyes back at me.
#
One hundred miles an hour was supposed to tear off the weight of the world, like shedding a snake's skin. Some people can jump out of an airplane and realign everything in their lives before their chutes unfurl. Some people can take a week-long vacation and regenerate, like lizards growing new tails. My brother rediscovered his ambition and purpose just by driving fast enough to peel the paint off the other cars. It had been the same thing every Sunday for over three years, everything identical except the model year of the emergency car.
"You need to relax," he said.
"This isn't the way to do it," I told him.
The speedometer was at a ridiculously wide angle, like some kind of funnel, and I couldn't make out the speed. It didn't make for relaxation. Meanwhile the car was perfectly quiet, except for a hum of gears turning. It was like traveling in a cocoon.
"It's exactly the way," Eric told me. "It puts things in perspective."
He took his hand off the gearshift and patted my leg.
"Listen," he said. His voice softened. "I've been there. And I'm not going back." He swerved around an eighteen wheeler. "I'm taking you with me."
He peeled off the freeway and brought me to a bar in the city, parking right in front, just like in the movies.
"Dan," he said as we were climbing out of the car, "don't sweat it. If something happens to you, I can take care of them."
I looked at him over the top of the car.
"You worry too much," Eric said. "I can take care of everything."
I'd heard that before, too. I was going to explain to him that money wasn't the answer to my problems, but I stopped myself because I didn't know if it was true.
#
His parking job was a little crooked, which would probably cause Kristi to shake her head. We got out of the car a little crooked, too, grabbing on to the roof to pull ourselves up. In the summer, you never quite know what time it is. The sun was at three quarters, but it could have been after seven o'clock.
Mad gave me the fisheye, and the kids were about to ask me where I'd been, but Eric quieted them down with presents. I'd picked them out and Eric had paid for them. Emily got a toy doll that cried and wet itself, and Bobby would've gotten a model rocket if Eric had handed it to him, rather than tossing it across the room. There was an audible crunch as Bobby dropped the gift. Eric wobbled across the room to apologize.
"I'm sorry, Booby."
He started giggling.
Emily's doll was tied so securely to the box that she couldn't seem to get it out.
"It's all right, sweetie," Madeline said. She was using a voice reserved for an impatient child.
"Where's my steak?" Eric asked.
"Out with the hamburgers." She pointed out back and didn't change her voice. Emily was starting to whine with impatience. The doll chimed in, crying alongside her.
#
Outside were a plume of black smoke and three pieces of meat that would need dental records for identification. I flipped them off the grill and onto the grass, where they lay like charred turds.
Eric lay down and tried to make a grass angel when I heard the crying. Down the stairs came a delighted Emily and her opposite, in doll form. Bobby was more subdued, carrying a dented box with the NASA logo on it. He trudged down the stairs, turning the rattling package in his hands. Madeline followed last, trailing behind just long enough to make me wonder if she were coming at all. Eric passed her going in the opposite direction to check the refrigerator for cuable scraps. I squirted some lighter fluid on the coals to juice them up again.
Madeline was all smiles. She carried a tall aromatic cocktail on one side and a handful of slap on the other. She only used the former, but I felt the weight of her open palm just the same. Bobby tugged on one of my legs, and Emily took the other. One good handful and I would've toppled right into the barbecue.
"I'm sorry," I said.
"I'll get over it."
I repeated myself.
"Even though it's like failing shop."
"That's not what I meant."
"I know."
"Maybe you need to try again. Don’t give up."
"Don't give up," Bobby said.
"Don’t give up," Emily said.
Mad shook her head.
Emily whined when her doll peed down her dress. So, right there, we had confirmation that something worked. Mad took Bobby aside and explained to him how she'd exchange his rocket the next day. Bobby seemed to pull out of his tailspin; he and Mad began their usual roughhousing. Eric appeared from out of nowhere, carrying slices of bologna that he insisted we put on the grill. He brought along two highball glasses filled with ice and whatever my wife had been drinking. It had a cool lemon color, like the beginning of a sunset.
"Code Yellow," Eric said. I couldn't tell if he was referring to Madeline or the name of the drink. "It's a beautiful day."
Just the kind of innocuous statement I needed. I agreed with him, watching Mad roll on the ground with Bobby while Emily refilled her doll with urine. When Emily finished, Madeline took the hose and sprayed Bobby with it. Bobby laughed, taking the can of lighter fluid and spraying Madeline back.
Cool yellow replaced by red and black. Madeline hit the ground, just like the safety videos told her, and began rolling on the grass. I got the hose and Eric got Bobby.
#
Lighter fluid holds to fire pretty well. It seemed like it took an hour to put it all out, but it was probably less than ten seconds. In just as many minutes the paramedics were strapping Madeline to a board. Then they offered us all sedatives, like handing out popsicles.
Eric refused the injection and took charge. I remember a little bit of that day, the screaming and the smell, mostly, but also the yellow-green feeling that followed the medic's shot. Eric took our car to the hospital, leaving his on the curb for anyone to steal.
Three months later it was all over except for the scars on Mad's torso, which Bobby nuzzled and prodded incessantly.
"It's never as bad as you think," Eric told me.
I'm not sure if he was right about that, either.
#
"PRESENTS!" Eric screams from the door.
He's met with welcoming screams and then joined by doll screams and engine screams. The kids tear into the wrapping and then into the boxes. Emily rips her baby's limbs from their wire trap, and the doll screams in anguish. Bobby takes the fire engine from its plastic casing and rolls it across the floor. Since the accident, Emily's been obsessed with nurturing and Bobby with rescue. Eric obliges them both as often as he can. He puts a roll of bills in my pocket as if he's trying to feel me up.
"Everything's good," he whispers to me. "And it's going to get better."
Bobby's siren wails.
Madeline lays on the couch with a crossword puzzle inside her textbook, her tall glass beside her on the coffee table. Bobby's nuzzling raises her blouse above her waistline, and there's a pink and red blotch along her abdomen.
"I have to get something to put on the grill."
"You need me to come?" Eric asks.
"I can do it alone."
He tries to hand me more money but I shake it off. I lead them all to the back yard and we light the coals.
#
On the dashboard is the pack of cigarettes, freed from the plastic wrapper they'd been buried in. Next to that is a map of the Hawaiian Islands, as if I can take the car there. In the rearview is Kristi's face, checking to see if I'm obeying the emissions rules. She's looking in the wrong direction. The back yard is full of smoke.
"Sure you have enough money?" Eric had asked.
"Yeah, I'll manage. It's just hamburgers."
He'd slipped another roll of bills into my pocket, just like he'd done before.
"Steak for me," he'd said. "You too, if you want."
I'd nodded. Madeline and Bobby were sitting as far away from the grill as they could, while Emily did bad cartwheels back and forth across the yard.
"I'll see you," I'd lied.
In front of me is the newest emergency car, perfectly polished and situated just parallel to the curb. I pull around it, checking in my gym bag for the roll of bills, which seems to have grown bigger around than a bowling ball. I never bothered to count it, but I'm sure it's still outpriced by that car.
I tell myself we're different. We have different opinions about the most important thing in life, and what I say won't change it. I finger the money to make sure it's still there. The sun's going down. In the rearview mirror is the silhouette of my house, which I'll keep in my mind, as if it had been burned there.